Case
Wish2Go
Exercise app for children
We made this using:
React Native
GraphQL
App development & Frontend & Backend
Background
Rhyme brought in to help deliver an MVP for the mobile app Wish2Go, which allows parents to set up exercise goals for their children using the smartphone’s existing step counter. The parents can choose rewards, either their own or from affiliate webshops, that children are then entitled to when they reach their assigned goals. The parents can then also buy rewards directly through the app. Rhyme was brought in to shore up the development team that had brought the solution circa halfway. Having been built mostly by junior developers our task was both to oversee the current code base and produce the unfinished features that were needed for the MVP and soft launch on Appstore and Google Play.
Challenge
Together with the founders we identified a product backlog that included both bugs and fixes to already existing features, as well as completely new features that were central to having a marketable app. These included adding the logic and functionality of the product category-view where users can scroll and select different products for rewards, building the step counting component, adding push notifications, adding a landing page, while also overhauling the pipeline build and AWS setup from a cost point of view. Our mission was essentially to submit a fully operational solution with all the basic functionality of the intended product, as well as making sure it was working properly and accepted by Appstore and Google Play. The fact that we were building on others’ previous work definitely added to the challenge throughout the experience.
Solution
Getting the step counting feature to work properly was essential to the app’s core functionality. We used two different platform solutions to make sure the app collected the data from iOS and Android health apps and kept working in the background while the app was not running. The other major functionality was adding the product categories, which was done using Adtractions. Notifications were triggered using Firebase, which allows notifications to be triggered from the client application to the backend in a secure manner. Other major parts of the solution included:
- React Native was used to build the app frontend
- Node.js for building the backend, connected to Firebase for the notifications functionality
- GraphQL layer on top of Mongoose that stores the data in mongoDB Atlas
- The application was hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Results
The team at Wish2Go has in partnership brought the product over the finish line as an MVP that can be marketed to the public. The resulting application is available on iOS Appstore and Google Play. With the affiliates operational through Adtractions the app has been bringing in revenue from day one.
